Why some Koreans make $10k a month to eat on camera

I didn't think the idea that Koreans were so plugged into the Internet that they were replacing actual human contact with virtual dinners had much weight. I suspect that people watch and donate because they enjoy it. They are entertained.

It's the future of entertainment. We are seeing it in the West with Twitch.tv. People donate to their favourite streamers and companies sponsor them.

I've been getting into watching and following various ARMA3 role play streams. About a dozen streamers out of a couple hundred players will be interacting in the online world with its own rules, laws and codes of behaviour and we as audience get to see into the world through their eyes at the same time, get to see the same event through the eyes of a gamer playing a policeman or a gangster. It's essentially improvisational acting, and there's a huge potential here for some great entertainment. I think that's what's new.

But what makes it the future is that it's interactive, there is a community. The people on the other side of the stream interact back, sometimes directly to you, and you can interact directly with them. This may not be new - but it's new within this new field of entertainment, and I'm optimistic about it.

I have a family member who hates to watch people eat. It's not the social aspect of eating together that she dislikes, it's the actual act of eating that she doesn't like to observe. Therefore, if someone can dislike this act, why can't the opposite be true and there exist people that like to watch people eat?

Sounds like a William Gibson novel! I give it a couple more years before an example of "Idoru" comes along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru

So Man vs Food webcam style? Or Epic Meal Time? https://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime/videos

What's hard to get about people wanting to see others eat large amounts of food. US had the glutton bowl and that guy who's famous for eating hotdogs.

Very interesting article but a bit of a weird ending:

" Which is another way of saying that I object to mukbang on classist grounds, and am hard-wired to do so. There are very few excuses for bad table manners, and being on video certainly isn’t one of them."

The way it's described in the article, it sounds more like ASMR [1] than anything else. There's an active ASMR community in the West but it's largely not centered around eating food. It doesn't seem out of the question that the Korean ASMR community have developed a following around food.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_re...

As the article points out, Korea has the world's fastest internet. And this is how they use it ;)

Answer: because they are cute or in some cases funny.